AMD today released the latest version of their ATI video driver, Catalyst 9.3. The key addition with this release is official support for Windows 7, in the form of a unified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. As part of supporting Windows 7, Catalyst 9.3 supports WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) 1.1 for all ATI Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series of graphics cards. According to AMD, "this new WDDM 1.1 support utilizes DirectX 10 rather than DirectX 9 and can cut down your GPU memory usage by half when opening up multiple windows thereby enabling increased performance."

AMD have said the driver brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPU limited and using ATI Stream technology, owners of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of graphics accelerators will see a performance boost in their Folding@Home scores when running the latest Folding@Home client. AMD only documented one performance improvement in the release notes:

Lost Planet: Colonies gains up to 20% on 4800 series products, and up to 50% on 4600, 4500 and 4300 series products

...owners of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of graphics accelerators will see a performance boost in their Folding@Home scores when running the latest Folding@Home client.

AMD today released the latest version of their ATI video driver, Catalyst 9.3. The key addition with this release is official support for Windows 7, in the form of a unified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. As part of supporting Windows 7, Catalyst 9.3 supports WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) 1.1 for all ATI Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series of graphics cards. According to AMD, "this new WDDM 1.1 support utilizes DirectX 10 rather than DirectX 9 and can cut down your GPU memory usage by half when opening up multiple windows thereby enabling increased performance."

AMD have said the driver brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPU limited and using ATI Stream technology, owners of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of graphics accelerators will see a performance boost in their Folding@Home scores when running the latest Folding@Home client. AMD only documented one performance improvement in the release notes:

Lost Planet: Colonies gains up to 20% on 4800 series products, and up to 50% on 4600, 4500 and 4300 series products

Can you make this more clear .... we have over aged people around , that are a bit slow

Click to expand...

He means they dropped driver support for cards like the 2900's and 2600's way to early and it made no sense. But now it does, because as far as it looks from these notes, the new 9.3's support the old 2x00 series, which is nice for anyone who owns them.

Tried these with GTA 4 and DCS BS and GTA 4 i did not notice a performance drop and played the same as 8.12 and 9.2 driver set did. How ever DCS BS runs a hell load worse as it's messing up my TIR4 setup while looking around the cockpit ( Jerky ).

EDIT: Both games play no were near as good as they did with 8.12's or 9.2's. these are so gone lol...

agp support is very useful i mean a lot of people still have 939pin systems with dual cores

a lot of older systems still need support

the reason the 3850 was the last agp card is that any more powerful and the cpu bottleneck will become a problem, i think you can get a few AM2 agp boards but most are 939 pin and 939 pin cpus will become a bottleneck eventually

The actual fix for these was optimizations in the GPU, so games that are CPU bound will see greater benefit. i.e. They must have found a way to offload certain aspects that the CPU normally handles, to the GPU on a global scale. If you have free GPU usage (for me, in Warhammer), it should kick up a bit and take some stress off of your CPU.

I'll test it when I get home tonight to see if that's the case.

Oh yeah, F@H looks like a nice 15% bump in performance from some preliminary observations.